Any Questions? How Listening Sparks Innovation

Why are questions so important, and how should questions be used?

The skill of asking valuable questions is part of a creative mindset and opens up endless opportunities for innovation. It helps us gain valuable insights from ourselves, our colleagues, and our customers, or other people we are designing for.

Continuously asking questions helps us get below the surface, beyond the obvious, and helps us gain empathy for others, discovering the kind of human needs that lead to breakthrough innovations.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour webinar designed to highlight the importance of listening, especially during times of major change. I'll be joined by Leon Segal, Ph.D., and Scott Underwood of Innovationship. The two experience design experts will share their knowledge and insights about asking questions, along with tips for the creative use of questions throughout the innovation process.

Ten years ago, The Content Wrangler published details about a survey that found most documentation managers don’t use metrics as a performance measure. Has that changed? Have documentation managers stuck to their old, metric-less ways, or have they all become “quants” in 10 years’ time?

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Barry Saiff, — Founder and CEO of Saiff Solutions, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Technical Communications Leaders, and a 30-year veteran documentation leader — for a discussion about the ins and outs of calculating costs and return on investment for documentation projects.

Attendees will learn from the results of a real-world case study of a technical documentation project that required technical writing, technical illustrations, and a couple key metrics: cost per page and pages per date. You’ll learn how difficult it was for the team to track, calculate, and report these seemingly simple numbers and how they overcame these challenges. You’ll discover the connection between measurement and process design and learn important lessons that should help you avoid getting lost in the weeds of data- and cost-tracking.

The skill of asking valuable questions is part of a creative mindset and opens up endless opportunities for innovation. It helps us gain valuable insights from ourselves, our colleagues, and our customers, or other people we are designing for.

Continuously asking questions helps us get below the surface, beyond the obvious, and helps us gain empathy for others, discovering the kind of human needs that lead to breakthrough innovations.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for a free, one-hour webinar designed to highlight the importance of listening, especially during times of major change. I'll be joined by Leon Segal, Ph.D., and Scott Underwood of Innovationship. The two experience design experts will share their knowledge and insights about asking questions, along with tips for the creative use of questions throughout the innovation process.

Are you ready for how AI, machine learning, and other future technology will affect content development?

The database revolution changed our relationship to data, making it reusable for different target audiences, contexts and situations. It also made it ready for flexible delivery to different apps and across many different platforms and media. But somehow these outcomes never fully transferred over to content. How can we bring this same revolution to content and win the same kind of enormous improvements that would prepare us for the future?

Structured content management enables organizations to store, organize and build their content so that pieces are easily discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It provides the perfect solution for constructing large, complex documents, but also for delivering modular content to chatbots, portal sites, and mobile apps. But, more importantly, it is also key to future-proofing your content for emerging technological trends.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Steffen Frederiksen, Founder and CSO of DitaExchange, for this free one-hour webinar. Attendees will learn what structured content management is and how it works. They will understand what benefits structured content can have for writers, project managers, business owners, IT departments and content consumers. They will also learn how to prepare their content to be fed into new technologies with practical examples from the field.

The trouble with companies is that they're full of people, and people insist on having separate personalities and distinct voices. So, it's no wonder that issues of consistency and tone of voice creep into our conversations when we take an honest look at our content.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, wordsmith extraordinaire, Marcia Riefer Johnston for a free one-hour webinar during which we'll discuss the role voice plays in unifying a company's content strategy. You'll learn how to build a brand voice without sacrificing the individuality of the content creators on your team. And, you'll discover ways to empower content creators to succeed by participating in a simple, fun exercise.

Documentation leaders are knee-deep in technical communications issues, but rarely get help on people side of the fence. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Effectively managing technical writers and smart documentation teams requires leaders equipped to tackle an increasing variety of “people issues.” We’re here to help.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Barry Saiff—Founder and CEO of Saiff Solutions, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Technical Communications Leaders, and a 30-year veteran documentation leader—for a discussion about the staff management challenges that many documentation leaders face but rarely talk about.

Attend this webinar to learn how to you can overcome some of the most difficult-to-solve "people issues.” You’ll discover a wealth of resources you already have at your disposal to help you resolve interpersonal challenges.

Making things easier in TechComm is a combination of process, tools, and methodology. In this webinar, we’ll discuss the way Jorsek LLC thinks about TechComm activities and our general approach to making them easier and more efficient.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Patrick Bosek, co-founder of Jorsek LLC, for this free, one-hour webinar. We’re going to look at specific examples in future webinars — but first, we’re going to focus on the methodology, as it is perhaps the most important piece. The total mindset of "easier," (for us, our co-workers, and our customers) in TechComm is essential to being competitive in today’s world of technical publishing.

Attendees will learn how to identify things that can be made easier, how we think about improvement in our TechComm activities, and how DITA enables continuous improvement.

As content professionals, we are inundated every day with competing priorities, reduced resources, and a business climate that changes faster than we can assimilate. As a result, we are typically heads-down and focused on creating the content for our customer deliverables—everything from white papers and data sheets to text in the user interface and instructions to self-paced and instructor-led training. And often this gives us a very detail-focused view of the world. We tend to lose sight of the bigger-picture problem that our customers are trying to solve. In the end, we create detailed, accurate documentation or training or marketing content, but that content doesn't interoperate well with other content. We miss the forest because we're focused completely on the trees.

While content is incredibly important, the experience in which it is delivered can make or break a reader's success with that content. When it is delivered relative to the other activities the reader is doing, where within those activities (or journey) it is presented to the reader, and in what forms and formats—those are key success factors that make up the experience side of the equation.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Andrea Ames, for this practical one-hour webinar. Andrea will discuss her framework for designing the experience we are striving to achieve for our clients and customers, including the key components of a great experience; what it takes to achieve consistency across multiple content creators within a single experience design; the steps for designing a great experience, and tips for validating that the experience meetings the needs of your customers.

As technology moves forward at a rapid clip, new content delivery channels are coming online. Technical communication professionals today are beginning to understand the impact of these changes on their profession. Providing content to chatbots, voice interfaces, and machine learning systems involves tech comm pros learning new skills like understanding customer journeys and crafting conversational content experiences with machine-ready content.

Join me, Scott Abel, and my guests, information access expert, Seth Earley, Earley Information Sciences, and content delivery guru, Joe Gelb, Zoomin Software, for a discussion about the role taxonomy plays in helping organizations automate the process of content delivery and discovery. The duo will explore the need for machine-ready content—content that is optimized for automated delivery to consumers by computers. Discover the important role technical communicators can play in the creation of content that supports consumer demand for convenient access to relevant content when and where they need it.

If you’re like most organizations today, you’ve invested in content for marketing, sales, support, product strategy, and a host of other reasons. You’ve developed ways to more efficiently and effectively create, manage, and deliver content. Despite these significant investments, you—and your stakeholders—are likely still asking the question, “Does our content work?”

While that sounds like a simple question, getting answers can be challenging, to say the least. But, it doesn’t have to be. Not if you start with a strategy and the right tools for the job.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, content scientist Colleen Jones, for a presentation about measuring content performance. Jones (and her crew at Content Science) have spent the last few years working with large, global brands to identify what makes content effective—and how to measure it. The result is ContentWrx—a robust performance measurement tool designed to help your organization make content decisions that improve or accelerate return on investment.

Attend this free, one-hour webinar, and you'll learn how to track the six dimensions of content effectiveness and make informed business decisions based on data. You’ll discover the four elements of the ContentWrx system, and you’ll find out how easy it can be to collect, analyze and act upon behavioral and perception data. You’ll also learn how ContentWrx can help you close the gap between your data and user feedback.

As a bonus, Jones will share the top 3 insights from an analysis of data from more than 100,000 content users.

The Content Wrangler is a San Francisco-based global digital media company that exists to help organizations adopt the tools, technologies, and techniques they need to connect content to customers.

A small shop with two employees, The Content Wrangler uses webinars to build awareness, develop interest, and spot right-fit prospects. To compete with much larger firms, the company leverages its content strategy know-how to produce nearly 100 webinars a year on BrightTALK.

Producing that many programs may seem unrealistic for even a much larger team, but it’s possible because the company applies principles from lean manufacturing to their webinar production processes -- a format that any company can replicate.

Join BrightTALK for a special presentation from Scott Abel, Chief Wrangler at The Content Wrangler. You’ll learn how The Content Wrangler built one of the fastest growing—and most engaged—channels on brighttalk.com.

You’ll discover how adapting lessons learned from single-source publishing can be applied to your webinar production process, enabling you to produce more webinars with less effort.

Making content teams work together is a struggle. On the one hand, creating engaging and sharable content requires a diverse team of professionals—from copywriters, editors, and subject matter experts to content engineers, user experience designers, and content marketers. On the other hand, we are pitting people who need data and a benchmark to make decisions against those that plan and execute without that information. Some look for short-cuts to formal processes, while others desire and follow complex workflows and plans. Some are visionary while others are only worried about the here and now.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Andrew Lawless, for a free, one-hour webinar focused on helping content teams collaborate better regardless of their differences. You'll learn about a methodology that has been successfully used to coach hundreds of thousands of employees—from Fortune 500 companies to smaller family-owned businesses. You leave with a fresh understanding of human behavior, and you'll learn the real reasons people act the way they do. You'll learn how to ease conflict, strain, and tension in team relationships and you discover how to provide information to people in a way that they can best absorb it.

Who doesn’t want more fame, more influence, more respect and a legion of superfans? But blogging and podcasting are a time suck and building up that legion of superfans will take you years. Great news: there’s an app for creating quick video shows with your friends and followers that gives them the three things superfans crave: access, attention and acknowledgement.

But hasn’t this collaborative video thing been tried before? Yes. Dozens of times. But no one else has followed the wisdom of Jerry Springer like the Clipisode team has. Jerry Springer? The talk show guy? Do we have to fight on camera and take paternity tests? Of course not. Not if you don’t want to.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and publishing software expert Brian Alvey for a free one-hour webinar that takes a deep dive into Clipisode, a unique app for creating collaborative videos. See how Clipisode turns the influencer takeover model inside out and puts broadcast-quality video publishing power into anyone's hands — letting you go from concept to execution in minutes. Plus, get a first-look at a new online studio brands and agencies are using Clipisode to build branded animations for video shows.

As a technical communication professional, you know your work is valuable. But what if you're called upon to define, defend, and promote that value? Is it enough to say that good technical content reduces customer support costs? No, it’s not.

You’ll discover how adopting an “intrapreneurial" mindset can help you sell the value of innovative ideas, new approaches, and improvements in technology. And, you’ll leave equipped with practical actions you can take to convince “bottom-line” focused management that spending money on technical documentation can help them achieve their business goals.

We think of content as documents: articles, books, presentations, videos. However, readers focus not on the documents but on the answers that they may contain — the answers to questions such as "what is this for," "how do I," "why should I," and even "what is all the information on this particular subject." The tools of structured content let us sequence, chunk, and reuse information in a customer-friendly way. Yet, often a single chunk of information is not the whole answer — that answer lies in the meaningful connections between various pieces of content.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my guests, Joe Pairman of Mekon, and Andreas Blumauer, managing partner of the Semantic Web Company for this free webinar. Joe and Andreas will guide you on a journey that will show you how taxonomy helps us build meaningful connections so that readers can understand the big picture. They will talk about doing a better job of surfacing information for search engines—from Google to our own intranets. Ultimately, when granular chunks of content are networked with taxonomy tags as a knowledge graph, the system can answer questions that no-one has imagined yet — the myriad of messy, complex queries that arise in real-life knowledge-seeking.

Key takeaways:
• Benefits and principles of granular structured content, and how to prepare your own content for this new architecture.
• Best practices for linking structured content to standards-based taxonomies and pitfalls to avoid
• The underlying semantic architecture to build a truly mature and scalable approach to linking content and data

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Joe Pairman is Lead Consultant at Mekon Ltd., helping clients from healthcare to software realize the full potential of structured content and innovative information delivery with taxonomy. Andreas Blumauer is managing partner of the Semantic Web Company and is experienced with large-scale semantic technology projects in various industry sectors.

You bought the content management system, you migrated your content into it, and you might even have implemented DITA. So why is your content management such a mess? Content management projects have a way of sprawling into content un-management, especially if your organization started with a system but did not have a strategy.

There are several areas in which content management can become content “manglement.” The good news is, you’re already thinking in terms of managing your content, and chances are you can get things back on track.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for this free, one-hour webinar along with my special guest, Regina Preciado, a content strategy consultant who helps companies transform how they organize, manage, and leverage content. Regina will take a look at what went wrong—and help you come away with a plan for diagnosing your specific content management issues, and how to start treatment. Regina will talk about where things are most likely to get messy; how to figure out what’s really gone wrong—it’s (probably) not “everything,” and the steps you can take immediately to diagnose—and start treating—your specific content situation.

We all know the importance of a well-defined buyer persona. It tells everyone at a company who we sell to and what makes that person tick. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. But, when a company grows globally, does that ideal customer change?

Last year, HubSpot decided to "Go Fast in France." There was a lot of fanfare, hiring of French staff and several references to a famous cycling circuit. But, there wasn't a whole lot of thought given to exactly who were marketing, selling and servicing.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler for a discussion with Christopher Englund and Marco Chieppe of HubSpot about the importance of building market-relevant buyer personas. You’ll discover how following a roadmap—and doing your research ahead of time—can help you develop international buyer personas that work.

We’ve all heard advice about how to improve source content. These tips and tricks usually sound like perfectly reasonable suggestions. Common sense, right?

But, where's the proof that these so-called best practices actually improve customer experience? In 2016, content strategists from Google visited 11 countries to talk to customers in order to find out what these real people actually want and need from their content. As it turns out, lessons learned from Google customer feedback research provided some surprising results.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and my special guests, content strategy manager, Jon Ann Lindsey (Google) and global content strategy expert, Val Swisher (Content Rules), for a lively discussion about the importance of getting feedback before you make decisions about how you’ll translate and localize content. You'll learn several ideas you can use to adjust your source content so that your translations are improved. You’ll see lots of examples from content in the real world and leave with actionable items that you can implement immediately.

You will learn which problems Google found (they weren't just the usual suspects) and to make big improvements in your content that are easy to implement. And you'll discover why overtly "empathetic" language and reassurances don't always serve the needs of customers.

This program is brought to you by LocWorld35 Silicon Valley: The conference for global business. www.locworld.com

The World Wide Web has, in many respects, leveled the playing field—making it possible for businesses of any size to develop an international following. But, building an multinational presence means ensuring your content is global-ready.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, senior analyst Rebecca Ray of Common Sense Advisory, as we discuss how to develop and use marketing personas, customer journey maps, categorization, and content tiering as the building blocks for a pragmatic global content strategy.

Attendees will learn how to apply domestic market discipline to global rollouts, steps to follow when creating a practical strategy, and the importance of validating domestic marketing profiles to ensure they are appropriate for global use. You'll also learn how customer journey maps, auditing and categorizing of content for local markets, and establishing content tiering criteria based on hard data can help you be successful.

Business today is digital, and that makes content critical. Where can you get tips, advice, and inspiration for the content side of business? Enter the online magazine for content professionals—Content Science Review.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, content scientist Colleen Jones, for this presentation about Content Science Review. You'll learn what Content Science Review is — and what it's not. You'll discover the breadth of coverage and the benefits of both free and paid registration. If you're a writer looking to expand your influence, you'll learn how you can pitch story ideas to the editors.

As an added bonus, the editors will share their top-three reader-contributed insights of 2017!

You’re thoughtful about the web content you create to attract prospects and to serve existing customers. You take great care to make sure your content is well-written, properly-punctuated, and error-free before you publish it. It’s what you’ve always done. But, it’s no longer enough.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my guest Andrea Volpini, CEO and co-founder of WordLift, for this free, one-hour webinar on how to quickly make your Wordpress web content more capable. You will learn how creating semantically-rich web content in Wordpress can help you develop new ways of interacting with your audience.

You’ll discover how building a knowledge graph can empower your web content—making it readily available to chatbots, smart crawlers, voice interfaces, and personal assistants. You’ll find why making your content machine-friendly can help you optimize your content, so it appears at the top of the search results. And, you’ll learn how making your content intelligent can provide you with actionable business insights and metrics that matter.

The Content Wrangler Channel covers the people, methods, tools and technologies designed to help you deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right device, in the right format and language. Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.